A Book of Gems
Choice selections from the writings of Benjamin Franklin

By Benjamin Franklin

Page 188

claim this Mystery of Iniquity has on ourcharities.

It refuses to allow its adherents to become members of the Masonicorder, because it is a _secret Order_. The trouble is that it is a_secret Order_ itself, with its _sworn members_ and _bound priests_,its prowling Jesuits, nuns and friars, the most dangerous and completeand perfectâthe consummation of all secret Orders, from the hiredgirl in the kitchen, and the hired man on the farm, up through everyposition held, every situation in life, and every office held by aPapist, to communicate intelligence to a set of men bound up in this_Order of secrecy_, who are not even citizens in our Government, thatthey may report to the Holy See in Rome! It is a secret, Pagan andJewish mixture with Christianity; an intriguing, insidious and stealthyscheme, prying into the secrets of every nook and corner of every land,and every move of every civil government on earth, and a friend to nocivil government on the face of the earth, only so far as it can bemade subservient to the purposes of the Pope.

The new Cardinal in this country is a minion of the Pope, and, withoutbeing a citizen of the United States, when he pleases to do so, willcontrol the vote of some six millions of our population; and this alldone by the _secret workings_ of the Papacy, without any man seeingthe secret wires that are pulled to do it. These priests, bound allover by religious _vows or oaths_, in a _secret conclave_, planschools to be taught by nuns, all in the _secret Order_, and gatherup vagrant children, while many of their own children are beggars, tomake Romanists of them, and shut them out from the light of the commonschools and colleges of this country.

Then how do these priests propose to gain power? Do they propose tocome out in open day; publicly teach the people and enlighten them?Not a word of it. Do they propose to discuss their claims? Not a bitof it. How then are they doing this work? _Insidiously._ It is all inthe dark, except an occasional demonstration like that we had hereon the first Lordâs day in July. What were the people taught on thatday? Did any one hear any instruction? Thousands of dollars wereexpended. Thousands of people were weary and exhausted, but no onewas enlightened. No one was taught even Romanism, except those, whofrom the word of God have learned the power of the

Text Comparison with The Complete Works in Philosophy, Politics and Morals of the late Dr. Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 1 [of 3]

I afterwards compared my Spectator with the original; I
perceived some faults, which I corrected: but I found that I wanted
a fund of words, if I may so express myself, and a facility of
recollecting and employing them, which I thought I should by that
time have acquired, had I continued to make verses.

while the bells were ringing,
I took the phial charged from the glass globe, and applied its wire
to the erected rod, considering, that if the clouds were electrised
_positively_, the rod which received its electricity from them must
be so too; and then the additional _positive_ electricity of the
phial would make the bells ring faster:--But, if the clouds were in a
_negative_ state, they must exhaust the electric fluid from my rod,
and bring that into the same negative state with themselves, and then
the wire of a positively charged phial, supplying the rod with what
it wanted (which it was obliged otherwise to draw from the earth by
means of the pendulous brass ball playing between the two bells) the
ringing would cease till the bottle was discharged.

Then I considered the separate particles of water as so many
hard spherules, capable of touching the salt only in points, and
imagined a particle of salt could therefore no more be wet by a
particle of water, than a globe by a cushion; that there might
therefore be such a friction between these originally constituent
particles of salt and water, as in a sea of globes and cushions; that
each particle of water on the surface might obtain from the common
mass, some particles of the universally diffused, much finer, and
more subtle electric fluid, and forming to itself an atmosphere of
those particles, be repelled from the then generally electrified
surface of the sea, and fly away with them into the air.

West further informed me, that a person of undoubted veracity assured
him, that, being in the door of an opposite house, on the other side
of Water-street (which you know is but narrow) he saw the lightning
diffused over the pavement, which was then very wet with rain, to
the distance of two or three yards from the foot of the conductor;
and that another person of very good credit told him, that he being
a few doors off on the other side of the street, saw the lightning
above, darting in such direction that it appeared to him to be
directly over that pointed rod.